Matt Riemann: 3D Printed Burgers, Epigenetics & The Future of Health

It’s ironic. We’re overloaded with “health and fitness” technology, but our collective health is worse than ever. In a world replete with Fitbits, Apple watches, and other gimmicky gadgets, most of these self-trackers don’t do much to actually improve our behavior.

Today, you’ll learn why that’s about to change.

Matt Riemann is a social entrepreneur in personalized health. Like Fat-Burning Man, he’s harnessing cutting-edge technology to change the health trajectory of the human race. I dig it.

On this show, you’ll discover:

How NOT to lose your mind in the age of misinformation overload

How food, exercise, friends, and even career alters your genetic expression

MATT RIEMANN: THE FUTURE OF HEALTH

Abel: We’re here today to talk about the future. In the face of an uncertain future, it’s important that we embrace the promise of technology right now because it seems like we’re about to lose our collective minds. So as you see it, what are the biggest promises of technology?

Matt: Well, it’s a great question to start with, Abel, and it’s funny that you should actually mention this. Are we about to lose our minds?

Because one of the potentially most positive progressions of humanity is that we could lose our minds the way we have them right now. And we talk about some concepts such as battered mind syndrome, where our own minds are often our biggest enemy and we sit here and we judge ourselves in the mirror and we look and compare ourselves to other people. We always constantly tell ourselves we’re not good enough or we’re not achieving anything, and we’re never going to be where we need to get to, and this is a constant story that happens in our minds all the time.

It’s a funny play on words actually. For us to lose our minds might actually be a positive thing, and for us to all go insane might actually be the definition of what we need to be doing moving forward—to be able to lose the way that we are thinking about things right now.

We’re caught up in a day and age where the things we say to ourself in the mirror, we would never want to say them to someone else. The things that we say, “You’re overweight, you’re not good enough, you’ll never achieve this.” If you saw someone in the street talking to someone else like that, you’d probably want to go out there and have a good chat to them or intervene in that conversation. Yet we allow this to happen to ourselves all day everyday.

Our mind is actually one of our biggest strengths, and the future is going to revolve a lot around understanding more about the mind and how we can actually transition into a future that has a good understanding of the mind. That can help us, and be on our best side, as opposed to against us right now.

Abel: We grabbed the Amazon Echo with Alexa a few months ago. I hadn’t used Siri that much on Apple devices, but AI is getting better and better… The thing that I surprised me the most at beginning is when you’re interacting with digital assistants, you can say whatever you want, even if it’s in kind of a rude tone, especially if you’re frustrated sometimes it comes off that way. There are no repercussions for that, which is strange as a human with emotions.

Obviously, at least at this point, AI’s don’t feel emotion. Where you’re playing, if technology can be an active participant in giving us positive self talk, the antidote to our negative self talk, that could be very useful. Used strategically, this could point your behaviour in the right direction through automated systems, right?

Right. And it’s a fascinating time to be alive because there’s so much of this that’s starting to occur. The technology industry is just going gang busters with the progressions that are here now. Augmented reality and virtual reality—you have mixed realities that are coming into place. In every different field it’s happening. You can always attend a live concert these days—put on your virtual reality and it’s like you could pick the best seat in the house and be there with the 360 degree vision while sitting in the comfort of your own home.

This is now progressing to the health and medical fields. People doing surgeries, you can actually go in there and look into your own body in 3D, dive into your 3D blood vessels, and look at what’s happening inside. It really is an interesting time to be alive, and a lot of the progressive things like Pokemon Go and other gamification type applications are bringing reality to us. This is where we talk a lot about health and medicine.

That’s one of the big conversations we’re having in the world right now: How can we help people be healthy, be happy and avoid chronic disease?

A lot of the understanding there. With realities that change, we’re talking again about the concepts of the mind which we shared before—you can be sitting in the comfort of your own home, you might be sitting where you are in the world and I’m sitting where I am in Australia, and we can both put on our virtual reality headsets and go to the Bahamas together. We can go to wherever we want together. Let’s go to Hawaii, and you’ll suddenly be in Hawaii and I’ll meet you there.

Abel: Let’s go to space.

Let’s go to space and we can have fun. We can climb trees, and do what we want and our mind will actually interpret that information. The senses and the information that comes in through our eyes, through our ears and in through everything else, will interpret that information as reality. So for us, for our minds in that moment, that is our reality. Our brains will then produce chemicals accordingly.

So if we’re having a good time, our brains will produce the happy hormones and we’ll be in a great space of excitement. We’ll have all that dopamine that gets produced by serotonin, and we’ll have oxytocin, and we’ll have all those things that get produced as if we’re there. So you’re sitting at your home, I’m sitting at my home, we’re not doing anything, we just have these glasses on, yet we’re producing hormones that are benefiting our health in a big way.

We’re starting to understand the excitement of future by harnessing these concepts. We can actually influence our health in such a positive way using our minds, which is a whole different conversation than what we’ve been having in the diet and exercise world.

Abel: It’s absolutely true. Here in Austin, Texas, we’re in a tech hotbed due to South by Southwest, and a lot of tech companies here. But during the Pokemon GO phenomenon—it was fascinating—this town transformed. You’d be walking down the street, you’d see flocks of people crowding around these virtual places where they’re fighting and collecting little Pokemon.

But if you take a step back and look at this from a birds-eye view, you see all these humans getting outside in droves for the first time ever. And if you forget that it’s Pokemon GO for a second, and you just imagine that it’s a bunch of pixels that have different colors on them, and people are looking at those pixels, then all of a sudden you see massive human change, and even sociological change, psychological change, going on en masse, sweeping the nation and the world all at the same time… due to some stupid little game that people only played for a week or two.

But that’s just the beginning, right? It’s important because I think that will forever be an example of how much human behavior can change on a whim overnight.

Yes, it’s one of those things that will be there forever. It’s not just a virtual reality or an augmented reality, it’s the first mixed reality that the human race has experienced on a large scale—it’s so exciting. One of our big messages, and the things that we talk about a lot around the world, is about personalized health and about understanding how unique everybody is.

In the 7.3 billion people on the planet, there’s not one single person that’s the same.

We’re different shapes and sizes, we have different genes, we have different brains, we have different organs, we have different disease risks—everybody’s different. There’s not one single person that has everything that’s the same as another, not even identical twins. We’re so different physically that how can we ever expect the conversation to be the same for all of us?

We’re so different mentally with our minds, too. The thoughts we have, the cultures that we have, the beliefs we have, the conditions we have. We’re different spiritually with our religions, with our purpose and passion in life.

We’re such different beings, and at the moment the conversation we’re having around the world is still a very generic conversation. It’s very outdated. We’re running very old software programs.

We’re really trying to help people understand that we’re shifting the paradigm from where we’ve been in the old school version of the food pyramid days. We’re shifting away from, “You should eat this much food,” to saying, “Well, actually, instead of food being the focus, let’s have the person in us as the focus.” And it’s not about the food anymore, it’s not about the exercise program anymore, it’s saying, “These are great things and great tools to help us,” but really we’re saying, “How does that interact with your unique body?”

We all know the generic recommendations that say things like we should all walk 30-50 minutes a day, but that may cause some people to have back pain, knee pain, headaches, etc. We know the latest research coming out may say that tomatoes contribute to cancer, or kale can be a significantly detrimental food for some people. But when we focus on the food, the tomatoes are high in antioxidants and lycopenes, and they’re so great and everyone should have them, but yet now they can actually cause ill health for people.

The same with beef, and every other type food. It’s not necessarily about the healthy fruits and vegetables everyone should eat. But rather asking, “How does this specific tomato, or how does this specific kale or broccoli interact with my body?” And this is something that we know now, it’s a common topic that we have at government levels.

Our message at the moment for everybody who’s listening in is to say: Hey, take the time to go out and find out who you are.

Because you’re different from your mom and dad. You’re different from your kids, you’re different from the guy at work and the guy on the train next to you. So, take the time to find out who you are, because there’s foods that are good for you and foods that are not so good for you. There’s exercise programs that are good for you and not so good for you.

That’s a conversation that we’re interested in having, and we can unpack it a bit if you like in terms of genetics and epigenetics.

Abel: I was talking to a doctor of oriental medicine recently, Dr. Andrew Miles, and he said… “Being told to eat six servings of vegetables a day is like being told to wear six pounds of cotton.”

It’s advice that comes completely without context. It’s really not useful for people. What is useful, is learning how your body interacts with different foods, and having a very personal story about that.

You have two Degrees in Applied Human Sciences, you’re training Olympic athletes… And, all of a sudden you’re in crippling pain because of protein shake?

I was healthy—I thought I was the healthiest guy alive. Yeah, many of us could stand up and say, “Well, I go to the gym three or four times a week. I surf on the weekends. I ride my bike to work every day. I have the best job, work with the best people, I have low stress, super happy. Everything’s right.”

And then one day, I woke and I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move—that was an interesting time for me because I was teaching doctors internationally about the art and science of the human body. I thought I knew a lot about it, and to end up with the diagnosis of a terminal disease was a pretty shocking thing for me… and it really changed a lot of what we’re up to in the world.

I was very lucky to lecture at a number of different universities, and have connections with some really progressive people, and I was able to connect with the leading science minds and medicine minds all around the world to figure this out. And that’s one of the messages that we really want to bring to everyone today, is that saying that, “This is where everyone’s unique.” I tried the normal stuff, I did every diet, exclusionary diet, and everything else under the sun before I could figure mine out. And it was looking at harnessing the concept of epigenetics.

We all have different genes, 23,500 odd genes in each of our cells. In fact, we’ve got so much genetic material, it’s crazy that we don’t even think about it and talk about it more. You pull out 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA in each of the cells, and when you pull it out, it’s about six feet long in each of your cells. And just to give you an understanding, if you pulled a hair off your head and cut it into about 10 pieces, that’s kind of the size that you’re talking about, six foot fits in that. It’s absolutely genius how it works.

If you looked at the billions of cells in the body, actually expanded that through space, that’s something that would be about 67 billion miles long. That’s how much DNA you’ve got in your body, which is about 150,000 round trips to the moon.

So it’s incredible the power that we have in this information, and what’s even more incredible is to realize that your genes have no function at all—zero function. The genes just sit there and they’re a blueprint, and they require things to come and work with them and to interact with them to then produce the biochemistry and things that happen in your body and your physiology.

I won’t go through a microbiology lesson right now, but there are things called epigenetic marks that sit outside of your structures that either cause the cell to be able to read the gene or cause the cell to not able to read the gene. So the most important work that we do is to say, “What things actually cause these little epigenetic marks to talk to the cells, either turning the gene off or turning the gene on?”

Now for me, I have a specific gene mutation. My end goal is to say, “How can I turn that gene off and not express it so I can be healthy.” And here I am today. So this is something we’ve been able to harness and we’ve been working on for about 15 years, with the most incredible minds from all around the world, to better work out a way where we can quantify that. How do we actually quantify these epigenetics for each person, because they’re so different for everybody?

HOW FOOD AND EXERCISE TURN GENES ON AND OFF

We talk about epigenetics that are there at the very molecular level, the epigenetic marks. At the tangible level, it’s actually the foods, the exercise, the lifestyle, what we eat, how we move and the interactions that we have that dictate what messages go to these little epigenetic marks, that tell our genes to either get switched on or switched off.

This would be the foods that we eat, a field of study called nutrigenomics. Looking at the specific foods for you and your genes, how they interact with them, and how that actually changes what’s expressed for you.

You can switch your different genes on and off almost like a light panel at any point in time.

We were excited 10 years ago when we had these great progressive studies that came out showing that in 20 minutes of an exercise bike session, you can change your gene expression, which is a fantastic concept. Now we know it changes literally instantaneously in an immediate moment. As we’re having this conversation, our genes are changing. And it’s a very progressive time to know that the foods you eat actually influence the way that your gene panel is switched on and off at any moment.

The social interactions that you have, if this was a stressful conversation or if this is an exciting conversation for you, then you have different genes that’d be switched on and off. This may be the, “Oh my gosh, this is the best conversation in the world I’m listening to.” Or “This is boring, I’ve heard it before.” Whatever it might be for you, this is going to determine what actually happens with your gene expression.

The indoor environments that you have, whether you got dust and mold, if you’re sitting under air conditioning, all those sorts of things influence your genes. The outdoor spaces that we have, the climate, the temperature, the wind speed, humidity, all those things influence our gene expression. And our lifestyle factors with our exercise, the way that we move or don’t move our body is really, really important to see how we can change genes.

Our natural talents even influence our genes. I know you’re a musician, Abel. Let’s say you’re sitting behind a desk trying to be an accountant all day, when you should be out being a musician. You’re going to suck at it.

It’s very stressful for our bodies, brains and minds if we’re doing things that we’re not naturally suited to.

The amount of sleep that we get is one of the biggest factors and there are different times to sleep for different people. There’s different amounts of sleep for different people. And of course, our mind is a big factor individually.

So, there are all these things and we talk about the six key areas, which are food, exercise, environment, social interactions, minds, and natural talents.

Those are the six key elements in epigenetics that change the way our genes are expressed, which then change the biochemistry that’s produced in your body, which equals your state of health or your state of disease. And so, this is the mechanism with epigenetics—we can understand all those specific things and actually get to choose. We have control.

We get to choose the food that we put in our mouth, we get to choose how we move our body or how we don’t move it. We get to choose who we hang out with and the conversations we have. We get to choose where we live. We get to choose the way we think. We get to choose how much sleep we have. We get to choose what we do with our time.

We have a choice with all these things, which means we’re actually in 100% control of our health destiny, which is a really exciting conversation.

Abel: I remember mentioning epigenetics a few years ago on the podcast, and everyone was like, “Epigenetics? What is that?” Now, it seems like it’s a recurring theme that comes up in more and more of these shows I do.

But let me ask you this, coming from a place of ill health as a result of the genetic blueprint that you have. Knowing everything that you know now, how has it actually affected and changed the choices that you make every day?

In a huge way. I now have the information and the understanding about what my unique body needs, and that’s really the key. And you mentioned protein shakes—back in those days, I was eating a very high protein diet. I was having my protein shakes and doing all the stuff I’m supposed to. When I found out about my unique body, I started to understand that I have a very low amount of natural digestive enzymes, and all the protein that I was having wasn’t getting digested, and it was actually floating around and causing some calcification in parts of my spine, which then made my nerves dysfunction, etc.

So I had a lot of the autoimmune characteristics that came from me having too much protein in my diet, which went completely against what we’re told about eating protein if you’re working out, which I was. But now understanding that everybody’s so different, I actually went through about a six-month protocol of no protein at all—zero. It was very difficult, but not as difficult as the exclusionary diets I’d tried before. I must say that the hardest one I did was starch-free, where I had to walk around and drop these little iodine spots on on the food before I’d know if I could eat it or not.

But anyway, this is how most of us live. We go through trial and error. Should I do the Paleo diet, or the juice fast, or the Mediterranean, or be a vegetarian or vegan, or what should I do? There’s so much conflicting and confusing and overwhelming information out there.

Well, the answer is, it just depends on who you are. What’s good for your unique body right at this point in time? And for some people, they might need to be on a vegetarian program for a little while to detoxify their body. For some people, being on a vegetarian diet is really not healthy for them. It just depends on the unique person, and we now have this information available at the very specific molecular level.

MEET SHAE: “SIRI” FOR YOUR HEALTH

We spent a lot of time to quantify this and bought into a system that we called Personal Health 360. Which is a way that you can actually measure yourself in about 30 minutes at home, and have this information that’s available to you. It’s really progressive. We’ve been at work to reverse engineer a lot of the things with genetics and bloods and stuff, and we can now do this in a non-invasive way. It means that if you’ve got a certain eye color, for example blue eyes, you’ve got certain genes that give you the blue eyes. If you’ve got dark hair, you’ve got certain genes that give you the dark hair.

So we are now able to measure what we call your phenotype, which is the expression of your genotype. It tells you which genes you have switched on that equals you. We’re now able to measure that, and reverse engineer and know about the genetics that you have inside without even needing to take a genetic panel. It’s very, very cool.

And we understand from the genes you have switched on, which biochemistry you have in your body. We don’t even need to take a blood test anymore. We know about your hormone dominance, organ function, and health status without having to even take a blood test or genetic test anymore. Which is very, very pioneering, and we’re obviously having some great conversations now with nations, the World Health Organization and many large governments about all this because it’s the next thing.

We talk about the future. It’s the next thing that’s coming in a big, big way. In terms of population, health is a personalized conversation as opposed to generic conversation. And it’s exciting to be part of that pioneering movement and mission that’s occurring around the world. And what’s underneath it for all of us is the mission that we currently share, which is working towards elimination of chronic pain and disease from the planet and in fact we’re working towards that by 2050. We’ve got a 50 year plan that we’re working on, and we’re about 15 or 16 years in now. To that end, it’s absolutely incredible with what’s happening, what’s available and what’s possible.

And you talked about Siri, and you talked about the different communication pathways. We now have a technology that’s available. It’s an app that’s called, Shae. Shae is a Virtual Health Assistant that’s been dubbed by the media as “Siri for your health.” This is a technology that’s here to assist us in a big, big way, where you can actually talk to Shae and Shae talks to you in real-time and interacts with you. And it’ll even predict your health in advance, without you having to do much about it or even think about it.

It’ll say, “Abel, we noticed that your best time for dinner is in the next three hours. Would you like us to assist with that?” You’ll say, “Sure. Thanks Shae, that would be great.” Then Shae will respond, “Great. Scanning the restaurants in your local area. Here are three restaurants that match your specific, unique profile right now. Here are the menu items. Would you like me to book a table or order take-out so it’ll be ready for you at the best time to have your meal?”

Or “Abel, we detect that you’re a bit stressed right now. Would you like us to assist with that?” You’re like, “Sure. Thanks Shae.” Shae will say, “Great,” and will pull up a funny cat video from YouTube to play for you, or will go to your Music Library and actually play a specific song that’s matched to your natural brain frequency to change it from a state of depression into happiness.

This would be something that Shae would say, “Abel, we understand that on your usual travel routes you take Bus 205 to work. We recommend taking an alternative route of transport today, because there’s been an outbreak of allergens, and your immune system is low right now. If you catch public transport, you’re likely to get sick. Would you like us to assist with that?”

So this is where technology’s starting to come into play to assist with our health. It’s personalized health. It’s a conversation that’s just for Abel, or just for Matt. It’s just for you. And so, this is a really exciting time where we can be having these technologies become part of our life. And as you said before so perfectly, they don’t have any judgement, they don’t have any expectations, they don’t have any attachments, they’re just technology.

They didn’t mistreat you back when you were a kid. There’s nothing against it. If they say something to you, they’re just there to help you. And in fact, this technology, like Shae for example, is able to understand your specific gene expression, and recommend things for you to stay healthy. It’s only positive and on your side. It’s like having a team of health professionals follow you around all the time. Yet, it’s just through your smartwatch or your smartphone, or even through a laptop or computer, or any connected device. These conversations can happen for you, and all this incredible health support is now available without you even having to think about health or even know anything about health.

It’s a really exciting time in humanity to see where we’ve been kind of bogged down with a lot of the confusion and overwhelmed with conflicting information that’s out there.

Then moving that into the fact that most people aren’t motivated or inspired to exercise or eat the right foods. And even if they want to, it’s very difficult for so many reasons. And now we’re moving into a day and age where all those barriers are starting to be removed and overcome very, very quickly with technology. That’s exciting for me. It really is a great time, and we’re seeing it impact tens of thousands of people all around the world—this is in 89 countries already. It’s really happening. It’s something that we’re often not aware of in the conversation, but this is all happening. This is real stuff, and this is life right now.

It really is quite exciting to see people completely transform the troubles they have with sleep, stress, weight, digestion, and more. Even reversing their signs and symptoms of diabetes, heart disease, cancers, obesity. This is big game-changing stuff, thanks to technology and our understanding of personalized health and epigenetics.

Abel: I remember watching a movie years ago about the future. Basically, it’s an AI computer following you around. And the guy opens up the door to the fridge, and there’s a piece of chocolate cake in there. The computer says in a condescending voice, “Eating this cake will take approximately 13 minutes off of your life.” Then he stops reaching for the cake. It seems like we’re not that far off, are we?

No. We’re not that far off at all. In fact, there’s a concept that’s already alive, called the smart fridge.

The smart fridge is the fridge that knows what’s in the fridge. It knows if you’ve got your carrots and your vegetables. It can even talk to you with your devices, like Shae for example, to know how much food you’ve got in there, if the foods right for you, and can have conversations about whether the food is healthy for you or not. And it can even be matched up with other big companies that are looking for ways to incentive and reward you to say, “Well, actually, Abel, if you ate that chocolate, it doesn’t just take 13 minutes off of your life. It will actually count towards a negative balance.” If you eat all the healthy stuff, you’re going to get rewards from your insurance company.

So here’s where augmented reality comes in. Technology will already know what’s in your fridge. You can decide if it talks with your home as well. It’s not just your fridge, it’s your smart toilet that measures your poop and microbiome.

It knows about you, just by you going to the toilet and going about your day. When you walk in, the temperature adjusts. It’ll understand and acknowledge it’s Abel that walked in. It’ll change the temperature according to your unique body and what you need at the time. This is the concept of the smart home, the smart fridges, the smart toilets. This is alive right now. This is being tested. It’s not rolled out in a major way yet, but it’s big and it’s coming and it’s here.

This isn’t those future Star Trek conversations. This is available and alive right now, which is quite cool and a little scary. It is quite exciting to look at all the information you can get from wearable devices, from different measurements of biomarkers and other things in the atmosphere and life.

There’s a lot of great companies doing progressive things all around the world, even in terms of atmospheric identification. Looking at how the difference in atmosphere changes, influences the human body—there’s huge correlations with that. So now we’re looking at mapping weather patterns, looking at different electromagnetic forces in the atmosphere that influence us.

We often don’t think about it in everyday life, but our bodies on average are about 70% water. So is Earth. And there’s this incredibly huge thing called the moon (along with everything outside of Earth), and it influences the way the tides work in this water. Yet we completely ignore the fact that it has any effect on the human body, but it does.

Huge electromagnetic forces influence the atmosphere and are influencing the human body. We’re now getting the science and the data on this. So these really weird conversations about these sorts of things that have happened in the past with no justification are now getting scientific evidence. We can now measure changes in electromagnetic activity. We can measure the changes in the electricity currents of the body. We can see how things interact.

We can see the change in human heartbeat. We can see the change in heart rate variability, which are dictators of stress and other things that are in our body. So we now know how the patterns in the weather and patterns in the moon phases actually influence stress, influence women’s menstrual cycles, and other things like that. These are known conversations, and we shouldn’t ignore them in general conversations. These are all things that influence our unique bodies, and all things that science is now bringing into personalized medicine.

3D PRINTED BURGERS? THE FUTURE OF FOOD

Abel: It’s all happening at the same time. We have AI robotics, sensor technology, the internet of things. All of this is converging. We know right now that eating from nature is almost always a good plan. But looking forward 10, 20, 50 years from now, do you think it’s more likely that we’ll be eating from a farm, or a lab, or something in between? It’s hard to conceptualize now.

That is happening. It’s been almost 5 years since the first burger was 3D printed and the best chefs in the world couldn’t tell the difference between a burger that was cooked live and a burger that was 3D printed.

This isn’t to say that the best musicians in the world couldn’t tell the difference between the best violins in the world that were made from the beautiful 1,000 year old trees versus one that was 3D printed. Right now we’re 3D printing live blood, we’re 3D printing organs and doing live organ transplants with people.

We talk about food. Well, the food and the nutrient density that can be produced by 3D printing is almost incomparable. It’s almost impossible to tell the difference between them. So whether that’s going to be widespread or not, my opinion would be, I hope it’s not. There’s so much more to food than what we see. But from a nutrient value point of view and from a molecular point of view, they’re comparable.

We like to see things in terms of nature, having a lot more depth to the conversation. The way we interact with the land, the way we interact with the foods, the way the foods interact with us. It’s all energy at the end of the day.

And this is something that, again, used to be a bit of a left wing conversation. It’s now very accepted in science and medicine that food is energy. We measure the energy. We understand it. If I eat an apple or a strawberry, the actual molecular compounds and the structure of the food and the energy that’s there changes as it goes into my mouth. I chew it, it changes form, it goes into my body and that changes and that feeds and nourishes me. Or it can go against me, depending on what I need at that particular point in time.

Understanding the energy that comes from the sun and other places is something we don’t really understand enough yet. But there are all those concepts behind having natural farm food as opposed to having something that’s been 3D printed. Even though you could compare it in a lab side-by-side, there’s a lot of things that we want to consider that we can’t get out of a 3D printed situation.

That being said, other things can be 3D printed, and can be helpful, especially if we are talking in reactive care. A lot of the work that we’re involved in with the Ultimate Human Foundation is looking at the preventative aspect. We’re looking and saying, how do we reverse and prevent chronic pain disease? Well, we’re looking at future generations; people who haven’t even been born yet. The concepts of conscious parenting to help change minds, to help get it right. The fruits and vegetables that are going to help keep them healthy and avoid disease states.

That’s the bigger conversation. We’ve got four billion people right now that are suffering from chronic pain disease. We’ve got a big problem on our hands. We need to go and work out how we can use this technology and our understandings of personalized health and medicine to harness that information and help people.

So that’s a really important conversation that we’re having in a big, big way for reactive medicine. We’re asking how we can use this for people with specific deficiencies. And this deficiency in their vitamins and minerals can cause a dysfunction which equals an organ not working properly.

When that organ or the system in the body doesn’t work properly, they end up getting symptoms. When they get symptoms, we classify that as a disease and then you get diagnosed. We completely miss the point that it’s about this underlying problem in the first place.

So when we can harness these epigenetic technologies, we can understand the actual imbalance is in the first place. And we can go on and use something like 3D printing to print a natural medicine, or implement the change in that deficiency. This changes the organ function in the system. The symptoms go away and the disease is gone. This is a very, very different way that we’re looking at things now compared to what we have in the past.

So, better use the technology to help change the chronic disease state, and help reverse the sickness that exists in this world.

DOES GENETIC ENGINEERING POINT TO A FREAKY FUTURE?

Abel: AI tracking and adjusting to your behavior and lifestyle, that’s pretty non-invasive stuff. But on the other side of things, you also see technologies like CRISPR and gene editing coming online at a the same time. It looks like we’re going down the road of democratizing that, where anyone around the world could be engineering, or re-engineering DNA… which is a freaky thought.

Where does that leave us? If you watch sci-fi movies about dystopian futures, there are two classes of people. There are basically the designer babies and all of the people who have been altered by technology. And then there are just the regular people who leave it all to chance.

Well, that’s certainly an interesting conversation because it’s been a few years since DNA was replicated in 3D printing. We’ve synthetically reproduced life at its core level. We’ve already been able to do that for a number of years. And most people don’t talk about that publicly, but it is a conversation that will be very interesting moving forward in the future.

Abel: It’s a slippery slope.

It is a very slippery slope. And it’s a conversation that will happen in due time. And where we go as humanity will be dictated by our decisions. It is possible to change genetics. It is possible to have a designer baby, as you said. There’s very strict rules and regulations around what’s done in the lab. It’s exciting, yet scary at the same time.

The best thing is to really understand that no matter what we do with our genes… As we shared today, your genes don’t actually have any function at all. It’s about the things that interact with your genes. So, even if we change the genetics that are there, it’ll change our predisposition for our life, but it won’t change what actually happens because it is our environment and lifestyle that influences who we are. It’s about 90 to 95% of our environment and lifestyle that actually dictates who we are in health or disease at any point in time. That’s really important to understand.

Genetics can be changed. If we harness those concepts in the right way for humanity, then we’re going to head in the right direction. If we use it and abuse it, then we’re going head in the wrong direction and that really is, I guess, the ultimate test of humanity.

Where are we going to be in 2050? Are we going to survive? Are we going to be thriving? We have the choice to do either.

It’s really up to us, as humanity. There are huge benefits from understanding genetic modifications, and if we use them in the right way, we’ve got four billion people suffering from chronic pain disease that can be helped. If we can understand their genetic expressions, then we can work to help them be healthy and happy.

Even chemotherapy, for example, is still our most widely accepted form of cancer treatment. We know that specific genes react very badly to different chemotherapy agents. And we know that about 20% of the time it will cause death in someone, if they haven’t had their genetics tested.

That’s the case, yet routinely, genetics aren’t even tested across the board and we have shocking and alarming rates of death with chemotherapy. Not necessarily because it didn’t work, but because it was the wrong agent for the person.

Incredible advancements are coming from this if we use it and apply it in the right ways. I think it’s going to be up to the regulatory agencies and how we choose to move forward. It is powerful information, and I hope that we end up making the right choices.

Abel: So your watch might tell you what you should eat but you still need to make that choice.

Exactly. The interesting part of this is that a lot of the work we’re doing is trying to address how we can help that behavior change?

At the moment even though we can say, “Hey Abel, you should be eating your greens right now,” for example. That’s great to inform you of that, but it’s still very difficult for you to do that.

The next part of this, which is the conversation Shae has is, “And can I assist you with that?” And you’d say, “Sure.” And she’ll say, “Great. There’s a bar that can have a green smoothie delivered to you – in a more cost effective way than going to McDonalds – in the next 30 minutes. Would you like me to order for you right now?” “Yes, thanks,” and you have your green smoothie. It’s changing the way you participate in your own health. You’re involved in it, but it’s doing a lot of the hard work for you.

This is the Artificial Intelligence that’s really starting to sell, and we can use to actually address behavior change. This is the biggest conversation that we’ve had in the World Health Organization level for many years. Everybody knows that you should eat an apple instead of McDonalds. Everybody knows that smoking isn’t good for you. Yet people still smoke and eat McDonalds. The problem isn’t the information.

The difficult thing is the behavior change. How do we actually change the person from eating McDonalds to an apple? This is the conversation we are now having, and with Artificial Intelligence, augmented realities and mixed realities, what if we could create something that’s easier, more simple, more affordable and more accessible? It’s done for you without you having to even think about it. What if we could have health without even thinking about it?

That’s the conversations that are happening with technologies like Shae. It’s really progressive and is going to be a game changer for the health of the planet. We’ve been working on how we can actually make health affordable and accessible for everybody in the world.

That’s why these technologies are so important, affordable, and accessible. We’ve been working with the genius minds from all around the globe, hundreds and thousands of doctors and scientists and specialists and researchers to develop a way that we can actually have this information that’s more accurate and more powerful without doing genetic and blood tests, without having to do any invasive tests at all. You’ll have it on your smart phone or smart watch at home.

So that’s where we’re at with Artificial Intelligence, with technology, and the conversation about genetics and changing humanity. Moving forward, there is hope for us yet. And if we can apply things in the right way, we really can make such a huge difference in the world. If we all come together… which is happening a lot now with collaborations from technology, integrated medicine, communities, things coming together and intersecting. We really can work together and end up with a world that’s free from pain and disease.

WHERE TO FIND MATT RIEMANN

Abel: Well Matt, this has flown by. Before we go, please tell folks out more about your work and where they can find you.

Go to ph360.me/shae to find out more about the technology we’ve spoken about today, about the work that’s looking at gene expression, and understanding how you can harness these concepts for yourself.

Whether you come and check out Shae or not, my message for you is so so clear and so so simple: Take the time to find out who you are. Take the time to find out how unique you are and how different you are to everyone else and go and do what’s right for you. Because there’s a time that you should be sleeping, there’s foods that you should be eating, there’s exercises and movements you should be doing. People to hang out with to keep you happy. There’s so much that’s unique for you, so take the time to find out who you are and what’s right for you to be healthy and happy. We’d love to see you there.

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My guest this week, Jeff Chilton, will teach you to spot the difference between the real thing and a well-marketed, pricey placebo in a bottle and he’ll be talking about how medicinal mushrooms can improve your health and performance.

Reader Interactions

Comments

I’m so disappointed.. this guest reeks of bull****.. he is careful not to go into detail regarding how the application service his company has created works in regard to the actual science, and anyone who is up on the state of genomics today knows that we don’t have the current scientific knowledge to offer such personalized health information, especially with no dna sample or anything. If you look up the company it’s obviously shady. Many of the people who listen to your podcast might not realize they’ve been duped till it’s too late, too bad it wasn’t vetted before it went on air. I am and will continue to be a faithful listener and no stranger or detractor of the holistic arts because generally speaking they have some good ideas too that are sometimes not seriously looked at by conventional health practitioners, but this guy is an obvious snake oil salesman and it bothers me somehow that he made it onto your show. Just a basic web search on his company will bring up some obviously red flags.

Hi Misty,
I’m sorry you feel the way you do. Fortunately, for yourself and all Abel’s listeners, there is no “snake oil” about me or what I do at all. I actually have a Masters in Applied Human Sciences and am lecturer at University of Queensland and Griffith University in Australia, and also at Ohio University in the US, and run courses for medical doctors all around the world on the topic of epigenetics and personalized health, and the advancements that are happening in the field right now. I am also invited to consult with many governments around the world, and organisations such as WHO and the United Nations. You may find these concepts highlighted better in my TED talk that I was invited to do in 2015 on this exact topic. We obviously didn’t have time to go into all the science on this interview as that was not the intention of this interview, but you can find out all about the evidence-based progressive advancements by searching in many well respected literatures across the web if you need to continue your research and broaden your understanding, and if you are actually personally interested to learn about what is possible and all the detailed science behind it, we run free online courses and live 2-7 day courses for that very purpose, for the layperson through to medical professionals. I wish you all the best on your own health journey, and hope we all can always be open to new progressive discoveries in the fields of science and medicine, because i truly believe that if we can all rally together in collaboration and optimism to support their development and application then it’s possible we can help the 4 billion people suffering right now and move towards a direction of health and happiness, for everyone.

That is a little too far fetched but could you just not take regular lamb patties in an ice box and still do the above mentioned activities? I especially like your idea of eating those lamb burgers and then sharing some love